I'm not especially eager to go down the road, but given the alternative (Criminals having weapons and everyone else not doing so) it seems the best solution.
Still not convinced and there's always the possibility that rather than making it better it could become worse as more criminals may feel the need to become armed to protect themselves so instead of many being armed it becomes most (I'm sure there are some who will always decline to carry weapons). For someone who argues against the population being allowed to determine policy because they're frequently irrational and easily led you seem to have fewer qualms about arming them.
I'm sure I don't need to say that I'm not in favour of criminals having illegal weapons but I think on balance I'm more scared of potentially the majority of people having a gun than just criminals having weapons. I meet far fewer criminals on a daily basis.
Unfortunately, we never had adequate protection from pointless legislation...
And this would be where you'd argue for a written constitution? If you don't trust the government of the day to write good legislation then why would you suspect they will write a constitution that is good enough? To me that's appears a harder task creating a comprehensive constitution than it is writing (good or bad) piecemeal legislation.
That particular risk is increased, but is the risk to the individual increased overall? Many studies suggest that it is, both in the US and in other countries.
Do you mean that the risk is not increased to the individual? If you don't then logically the argument would be a non-starter i.e. if carrying weapons increases the risk to the individual compared to the current situation then based on your evidential approach the law should not be increased.
The more important question is would making guns more available make more people murderers than are now, and the answer is exactly the same... The violence level of a society is not a function of the number of weapons available.
Although we may not have more murderers, firearms do make it easier to kill from distance and potentially to kill more people at any one time than weapons such as knives do. I'm not making an argument for or against guns here, just noting that they do have distinct advantages for killing multiple people.
It may however be interesting to compare accidental gun deaths to accidental knife deaths/poisonings/blunt weapons etc. As it could be that while we create no more murderers by legalising guns we do create a lot more accidental killers.
For god sake.
When someone chases and is attacked and dies, he is hailed a hero.
When someone chases and catches and defends himself he goes to prison for 3 yrs like Mr Hussain (remember the one who defended against armed burglars then chased em down and clobbered one over the head with a cricket bat?).
It wasn't self defence in Mr Hussain's case. If Mr Singh had chased down the muggers and then proceeded to beat them almost to death with his mates then I'd not be in any doubt that he deserved to go to jail also. However we don't know what he would have done on catching the thieves since he was unfortunately stabbed to death so at this point we've got to assume that he would have not acted outwith the law and administered his own retribution.
